Guess What? Chicken Butt.

When I got laid off from my first advertising gig, I took a few months off before looking for another job and worked as a nanny for two-month old twins. Their awesome mommy ran a tight ship and we kept a feeding/diaper change journal, in which we wrote down every bottle, every pee, and every poop. I'm sure they'll love reading that when they're eighteen...

Never since then have I been so focused on someone else's bowel habits. Wait, scratch that...I guess I've spent months monitoring the litterbox comings and goings of my geriatric cat. But I had no idea that Mr. W and I would be on chicken butt watch every day this week. The things he neglects to tell me....

One of our new girls had what appeared to be "pasty butt" the day after we got her, so I Googled it and discovered that they can die if their little tooshie holes get plugged and they aren't able to poop.

And thus began a journey I never imagined Mr. W and I to be taking together...one of downy-feather butt cleaning with warm water and q-tips and many long moments of observation to make sure our girls are going as they should be.

If Mr. W had told me I might have to clean little butts, I'm not sure I would have agreed to adopt the chicks. But now that we're here, there's no going back... This may be our closest voyage into parenthood.

Much like with the babies I nannied for and my four nieces when they were infants, I'm totally captivated by the chicks. Everything they do is fascinating and adorable. Mr. W and I have been sitting side-by-side on the guest bed next to their pen watching them for hours since they arrived. They're growing up so fast, it almost makes me misty-eyed.

If you follow me on Facebook, you already know where we netted out with their names, but in case you were wondering, I rallied hard and had to resort to bribery (I can't tell you what...this is a family blog...) to get Mr. W to concede to the names I fell in love with. As far as I'm concerned, there's just nothing else that would have been appropriate to name them. Well, maybe Sandy, Rizzo, Frenchie, and Jan would have been okay, but now that I've met the girls, their coloring is just too perfectly aligned with their namesakes.

Here was my first bargaining chip:

And here are our lovely ladies:

You guys, I am IN LOVE.